CES: TOP TRENDS AND TECHNOLOGY

Pioneer’s main attraction was the company’s new plasma technology, which will be featured in models coming out later this year. Senior Vice President of Home Entertainment Russ Johnson explained that Pioneer wanted to look at how they build plasma TVs from the ground up, and in doing so developed three key new technologies for improving the picture quality. The first development is a new panel design that reduces the minimum luminance by 80 percent and increases contrast and black level. Second, a new color filter eliminates the extra sheet of glass that plasmas use and reduces ambient light reflection, creating a brighter picture that doesn’t get washed out in a bright room. Finally, Pioneer developed a new ASIC for better deinterlacing, scaling and noise reduction. A prototype model exhibiting these improvements was being shown at the booth.

Toshiba Executive Vice President Scott Ramirez introduced several new REGZA LCD TVs with a number of new picture features, including 14-bit video processing, Dynamic Backlight, ColorBust (for a wide color gamut), ClearFrame (a motion vector interpolation for reducing blur) and REGZA link (Toshiba’s name for its HDMI CD Link for sending control commands through HDMI). Three new LCD series (HL67, HL167 and LX177) will be available this spring, with many models in 1080p resolution. Ramirez said the microdisplay business will begin to decline in 2007, but the company is still supporting that market with a line of DLP TVs.

Hitachi’s Kevin Sullivan said that 2006 was a huge growth year for the company, which doubled its plasma volume and “nearly doubled” its market share. It increased its distribution into Best Buy and strengthened it’s A/V specialty category. Now the company is taking an interesting approach to the new 1080p trend but pointing out that their plasma TVs were always 1080, just not with the “p.” The company is taking a two-tiered approach to their plasmas. The lower-priced tier offers ALiS with a 1,280 x 1,080 resolution meant to be competitive against 720p and 768p panels. These will be promoted with the tag line “HD 1080,” and among the models will include a 50-inch unit for $2,499. The higher tier is comprised of 1,920 x 1,080 (1080p) products described as “Full 1080.”

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